Category Archives: Human Givens

I’m in the process of moving this blog from WordPress to a location on the MindFields College website. I’m so pleased with the amount of interesting content we’ve built up on this blog and I hope this can be continued at the new location which will look and perform the same but will just be under a different URL.

I’m still tinkering with the layout and pictures but from now on, to read more posts from Mindfields College and the Human Givens Institute on depression, anxiety, dreaming, psychosis, trauma, education, therapy and lots more – GO HERE —>>!

A core element of each Human Givens Diploma Course are the two live therapy sessions from Ivan Tyrrell and Joe Griffin on both weeks of the course. This gives our students the opportunity to experience the therapeutic process right in front of them, and is a vital teaching tool for someone being prepared to work effectively with distressed clients.

These two sessions are FREE, with expenses paid, and usual applicants suffer from a range of problems, including but not limited to: depression, anxiety, PTSD, trauma, sleeping problems, problematic anger, relationship difficulties, phobias, addiction, psychosis and obsessive compulsive disorder.

We are looking for suitable people to benefit from these free sessions this autumn at Gilwell Park in London on these dates:

It has been 10 years since the term ‘human givens’ was first used, and last weekend, on the 19th-20th of May, the third Human Givens Conference, attended by over 165 delegates, was held in Sunningdale Park near Ascot.

The event was a huge success, and we thank everyone who attended for making it the inspiring and entertaining weekend it was.

For those who were unable to attend, or for those who read this blog and would like to see some of the people and organisations who are implementing the human givens approach with great success into the ‘real world’, here is a short summary (a longer one is being prepared for the next HGI Newsletter for professional members of the institute) of all our speakers over the two days, complete with photos!

First up, after an introduction from Pat Williams, were Iain Caldwell and Julian Penton from Hartlepool MIND (website coming soon!), where they have had fantastic results (which you can read an article about here) using a human givens approach ‘recovery model’ with members of the community of Hartlepool who have mental health problems. They reported back on the progress of their organisation, gave some insight on how they got government funding, and proposed some new plans for getting similar projects going in other areas of the country.

Next was David Grist, the youngest member of the team working at The SPACE, a residential therapeutic community for children aged between 8 and 19 years. He gave a case study of how he was able to creatively tackle the problems of a boy with difficulties during a game of Badminton, using simple human givens therapeutic principals. Read more about the fantastic work being done at The SPACE here.

Following Eleanor’s previous post about our new website, and to further highlight the need for up to date knowledge on sleep and dreaming: here are some almost unbelievable direct quotations from a ‘science’ programme on BBC Radio 4 called The Defeat of Sleep.

The programme was about the drug companies search for ‘smart drugs’.

“There is a theory going round that we’re failing our brains. Vast potential remains untapped. If we could just maximise the time we spend in deep thought and subtly alter the ways in which we think, then maybe mankind could make rapid advances.”
“If we are going to take advantage of the untapped potential of our brains the obvious first step is to remove the time we waste, those eight hours we spend each night in the land of nod.”

“The part of the brain which really does require sleep more than any other are the higher centres, so what is very clear is that when we go to sleep at night the brain appears to go into what appears to be a deeper sleep and more profound, recovery sleep than the later part of the night and, as sleep progresses this depth of sleep decreases and we go into lighter sleep and more dreaming sleep it seems. So there is a certain element of sleep towards the end of the night that becomes redundant, more pleasure rather than anything else.”

“Infants evolved to sleep more, not because they need to, but simply in order to give their parents a rest.”

The people saying these things work in University departments and are cited as ‘experts’. And the ironic thing is that the programme was supposed to be about making humanity smarter!

A new website from Human Givens Publishing Ltd has just been launched that explores in depth Joe Griffin’s expectation fulfilment theory, the latest psychobiological explanation of dreaming, which has become an integral part of human givens therapy.

We are intending this site to be used as a valuable resource and we are hoping if you find it useful, you will be able to share it among friends, clients, collegues, relatives – anyone who many be interested to know more about this influential theory.

(Also, this is the first site I have ever built so if you spot any mistakes just contact me and I’ll do something about it!)